Sevillian writer Eva Díaz Pérez assures in her book Unusual Holy Week (Almuzara) that “there was a time, not very distant, in which Seville was atheist and anarchist, brother and sacred, libertarian and traditional. It was a time full of curious stories that are stored in oral memory because they have barely written and rescue them is almost impossible, since many of its protagonists have succumbed to time and oblivion.”
Indeed, beyond what the orthodox canon counts, on the margins of the officiality, the Holy Week of Seville also has an interesting chronicle as a sociological phenomenon that explains to a city over time. A cultural manifestation that is art, is tradition, but it is also political, object of desire for power and has as many readings as spectators of this Great Theater of the World in which the city becomes every year, from Domingo de Ramos to Domingo de Resurrection.
From a historical point of view, probably the first book that makes this interpretation of Holy Week as a phenomenon, not so much religious, but sociological, it is Theory and reality of Holy Weekby the poet Antonio Núñez de Herrera (1900-1935), which has rescued the Sevillana Renaissance publishing house.
Núñez de Herrera was one of the most heterodox feathers of noon generation, which received the young poets of 27 in Seville, with whom they lived in those foundational days; And he uses Holy Week to play Seville. “Gentlemen: you will see how the religious feeling slips and becomes an artistic feeling,” warns the poet in these pages written in 1934, in the midst of the convulsive social reality and the confrontation without barracks that the Council of Brotherhoods of Seville maintained with the government of the Republic in the city.
Precisely, the poet and journalist collects in this delicious volume the keys to one of the great contradictions that define Seville: that Holy Week captivates equally to believers already heretics, and in those years, both conservatives and monarchists and the passionate anarchists. “The last Nazareno is happy,” Núñez de Herrera writes. ” Two issues, sir ”, collect the pages of Theory and reality of Holy Week.
Herrera describes amazing situations such as those of that Nazarene who, once he has finished processing, “the sandals are barefoot and involves them in the last issue of The socialist”the anarchist who hides his gun under a picture of the Virgen de la Estrella and even, completely free of political correction, hints that Holy Week is, above all, a hedonistic party, a show for the senses: “Death is not here more than a work of art. And … it would once be necessary to say! A sensual theme. Holy Week of Passion and not of death,” he writes.
A year later, in 1935, the journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales, who already lives in Madrid, goes down to Seville to try, in the same way, to apprehend the soul of the city in the seven days that includes the passion of Christ. Another key date, after two years of boycott in which the Brotherhoods do not process the streets in protest of the anticlerical policies of the Republican City Council, the waters return to their channel a year before the outbreak of the civil war and the party returns in all its splendor. Chaves is the special envoy of the newspaper Now In which he works, but he really seems an excuse of the journalist to live again the big week of his city.
Collected in volume Holy Week in Seville (Almuzara), in these chronicles, seems to sustain an open and lucid struggle against the “official rhetoric” that unleashes the Sevillian main festival since the 19 Hardening, which receives the examination of consciousness and drunkenness, the barefoot of the penitent and the belly full of the brother, writes.
Díaz Pérez explains it, signing the book Unusual Holy Week Together with the journalist José María Rondón: “Chaves knows the city and Holy Week, but already works in Madrid, so he is free to make brave descriptions, and speaks of Capigorrones y hermanucos Of alluvion that only leave to show off the tunic. ”Certainly, the journalist dared with everything without censorship:“ The brotherhoods have a democratic constitution, naturally, corrupted. Theoretically, all brotherhoods have the same duties and rights, but in reality, each brotherhood is a perfect caciquil organization, ”he describes.
Also refers to the author of Belmonte How in Seville “the capirote is planted and the Cirio are the most warm believers and even very well characterized atheists.” Perhaps summarized in his hometown what might seem the impossible dream of the two Spain: “A city of conservative tastes, but at the same time possible and friendly,” says Chaves, as an unpayable observer of the Seville that already heard the bombs of 36.
Many changes have occurred both in the city and in the Sevillian brotherhoods since then, but Holy Week in Seville “continues to popularly maintain a spirit that does not differ. It would be enough to change some names so that many pages of this book acquire a surprising current,” wrote the already disappeared Sevillian poet José Luis Ortiz de Lanzagorta in the 70 Theory and reality of Holy Week from Núñez de Herrera.
Before and after, there have been many intellectuals, writers and writers of all kinds who have wanted to describe the soul of a city through its most universal popular expression, “there are the visions of a Becquer that demystifies and questions, and an Antonio Machado who discovers the Seville out of maps and calendars and that faces the Holy Week from their liberal and republican affiliation,” they write Rondón and Díaz Pérez. Unusual Holy Week.
And, he already summarized it with fine irony Núñez de Herrera back in 1934: “God made the world in six days. But this is more serious.”